Some other important words, which recur from time to time in the
Yoga-sutras, need to be understood, though there are no exact English
equivalents. As they must be used to avoid clumsy circumlocutions, it
is necessary to explain them. It is said: “Yoga is Samadhi.” Samadhi is
a state in which the consciousness is so dissociated from the body that
the latter remains insensible. It is a state of trance in which the
mind is fully self-conscious, though the body is insensitive, and from
which the mind returns to the body with the experiences it has had in
the superphysical state, remembering them when again immersed in the
physical brain. Samadhi for any one person is relative to his waking
consciousness, but implies insensitiveness of the body. If an ordinary
person throws himself into trance and is active on the astral plane,
his Samadhi is on the astral. If his consciousness is functioning in
the mental plane, Samadhi is there. The man who can so withdraw from
the body as to leave it insensitive, while his mind is fully
self-conscious, can practice Samadhi.
The phrase “Yoga is Samadhi” covers facts of the highest significance
and greatest instruction. Suppose you are only able to reach the astral
world when you are asleep, your consciousness there is, as we have
seen, in the Svapna state. But as you slowly unfold your powers, the
astral forms begin to intrude upon your waking physical consciousness
until they appear as distinctly as do physical forms, and thus become
objects of your waking consciousness. The astral world then, for you,
no longer belongs to the Svapna consciousness, but to the Jagrat; you
have taken two worlds within the scope of your Jagrat consciousness—the
physical and the astral worlds—and the mental world is in your Svapna
consciousness. “Your body” is then the physical and the astral bodies
taken together. As you go on, the mental plane begins similarly to
intrude itself, and the physical, astral and mental all come within
your waking consciousness; all these are, then, your Jagrat world.
These three worlds form but one world to you; their three corresponding
bodies but one body, that perceives and acts. The three bodies of the
ordinary man have become one body for the yogi. If under these
conditions you want to see only one world at a time, you must fix your
attention on it, and thus focus it. You can, in that state of enlarged
waking, concentrate your attention on the physical and see it; then the
astral and mental will appear hazy. So you can focus your attention on
the astral and see it; then the physical and the mental, being out of
focus, will appear dim. You will easily understand this if you remember
that, in this hall, I may focus my sight in the middle of the hall,
when the pillars on both sides will appear indistinctly. Or I may
concentrate my attention on a pillar and see it distinctly, but I then
see you only vaguely at the same time. It is a change of focus, not a
change of body. Remember that all which you can put aside as not
yourself is the body of the yogi, and hence, as you go higher, the
lower bodies form but a single body and the consciousness in that
sheath of matter which it still cannot throw away, that becomes the
man.
“Yoga is Samadhi.” It is the power to withdraw from all that you know
as body, and to concentrate yourself within. That is Samadhi. No
ordinary means will then call you back to the world that you have
left.[2] This will also explain to you the phrase in The Secret
Doctrine that the Adept “begins his Samadhi on the atmic plane” When a
Jivan-mukta enters into Samadhi, he begins it on the atmic plane. All
planes below the atmic are one plane for him. He begins his Samadhi on
a plane to which the mere man cannot rise. He begins it on the atmic
plane, and thence rises stage by stage to the higher cosmic planes. The
same word, samadhi, is used to describe the states of the
consciousness, whether it rises above the physical into the astral, as
in self-induced trance of an ordinary man, or as in the case of a
Jivan-mukta when, the consciousness being already centred in the fifth,
or atmic plane, it rises to the higher planes of a larger world.
[2] An Indian yogi in Samadhi, discovered in a forest by some ignorant
and brutal Englishmen, was so violently ill used that he returned to
his tortured body, only to leave it again at once by death.